Pornography website Pornhub is one of the world's most-visited sites but has been hit by a 'malvertising' attack

by James Rodger, Mark Page

14:45, 27 Oct 2017

Let’s be brutally honest, being one of the top 25 most popular websites in the world there are no doubt many people in the Grimsby area who will have stumbled upon Pornhub at some point. Accidentally, of course.

Unfortunately, it seems the millions of people who have browsed its huge portfolio of pornographic material may well have been victim of a “year-long” cyber attack on the website which has been installing malware on visitors’ computers.

Research by Proofpoint reveals a massive assault using “malvertising” which presented fake adverts for web browser updates to people visiting Pornhub.

Users of Pornhub may have been victims of a year-long cyber attack

The cybersecurity company claims the attack had been going on for a year and had “millions” of potential victims in the UK, US, Canada and Australia, the Coventry Telegraph reports.

The attack has since been shut down by Canadian-based Pornhub, which according to ranker SimilarWeb, is the 24 most visited website in the world as of May 2017.

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Proofpoint warned that this technique of tricking users into clicking on fake adverts and infecting themselves was effective, and had the potential to reach "millions of web surfers" if used elsewhere.

"While the payload in this case is ad fraud malware, it could just as easily have been ransomware, an information stealer, or any other malware," the company said.

"Regardless, threat actors are following the money and looking to more effective combinations of social engineering, targeting, and pre-filtering to infect new victims at scale."